Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik spoke for many Americans when he called out NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio and civil rights agitator Al Sharpton and “many other New York city officials,” saying to Fox News and Newsmax that these people “have blood on their hands.”
President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder and many news outlets should be added to this list. All of these people defied the “nation of laws” not only by questioning the grand jury decisions not to indict police officers in the sad cases of the deaths of two young criminals who happened to be African Americans, but by actively promoting the idea that these cases represent a prevailing practice among U.S. law enforcement and, even more important, that these cases are racially motivated.
With such blatant encouragement from the highest law enforcement authorities in the nation, the protests widened. They attracted sincere, if misinformed, activists, all the anti-establishment crazies within earshot, and finally the violent criminal looters and assaulters who stormed the streets, burned cars, threw Molotov cocktails at the police and National Guard — who were protecting the rest of us — and ended up carrying signs writ large with “Kill a Cop”. Well, now they have killed two cops.
In a frenzied climate like this, it is not surprising that Ismaaiyl Brinsley decided his time had come. He walked up to a parked police car and shot two officers to death as they sat in the front seat. Shortly afterward, he killed himself.
The official news conference later held by the New York officials featured the same mayor who had encouraged the protesters, taking the microphone and claiming that the current task of the city was to support the families of the fallen. He couldn’t bring himself to say that the police man that thin line in this country between an orderly society and the utter chaos of a lawless mob. Without these cops that the protestors want to kill, America would look like Syria, Egypt, or Lebanon. There is no “nation of laws” without law enforcement.
This is not to say that there is no place for reform in the American justice system. The core of that system is the courts. Police basically do what the courts tell them to do, with federal and state prosecutors applying judicial guidance to the troops.
There is always room for improvement among our law enforcement personnel. Continuous improvement in such areas as technology, knowledge of the law, community relations, and investigative techniques is always possible and should be welcomed. It would also seem to make sense for a community to seek a police force which mirrors the cultural and racial diversity of the community which it serves. Sometimes it is easier to trust the authority of someone who looks like you.
None of these reforms, however, can be achieved or even advanced by killing cops. Mr. Sharpton and his race-baiting cohorts are only causing further divisions between the races by asserting that racism is a core disease among the nation’s police. If there are more homicides per capita among the black population than the other races, it is because of the lawlessness which exists in so many pockets of poverty and desperation in American cities. The same is true of police shootings of black criminals. The law of averages prevails.
The real problems here are not the police. The problems are the conditions under which many of our poorer citizens are living, no matter their race or language. The energy of the protesters would be far more profitably focused on these issues than on killing cops.
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